Stave brackets disappear on a 1 line percussion staff

• Jun 7, 2019 - 03:11
Reported version
Graphical (UI)
S3 - Major

Regression since this problem didn't seem to exist in MuseScore 2.

  1. Create a score that includes a triangle, cymbal or any instrument that uses a 1 line staff.
  2. Add a bracket to this staff. It will be not be visible.


  3. Right-click on the staff > Staff Properties > increase the number of staff lines to 2. Now the bracket is visible.


When there is only one staff line the bracket has zero height, hence this problem arises. A simple solution would be to provide a minimum bracket height such as 2 sp, which is equivalent to what the height would be for a 3 line staff.

Bracketing multiple percussion staves

A minimum bracket height of 2sp would give 1sp of clearance either side of a 1 line staff. This minimum clearance should apply even when the bracket is connected to other staves.

Current behaviour


What interests us here is that the flat part of the bracket is not wide enough to enclose the percussion clefs, and the tips of the bracket are not wide enough to enclose the time signatures. The barline problems are dealt with in #290410: Barlines on a 1 line percussion staff.

Expected behaviour


Gould does not give an explicit minimum clearance, but the examples on pages 512, 513 and 533 of Behind Bars suggest a clearance of about 1sp, which I have shown in the mock-up. This is enough to enclose a percussion clef and to ensure that the time signature is within the tips of the bracket's curve.

Bracketing 2 line staves

2 line staves are separated by 1sp. If brackets are given a minimum height of 2sp then this will affect how they are rendered on 2 line staves. We will need to see some examples before we can decide whether this is a problem.


Frequency Once Few
Reported version 3.1 3.2

Hello everyone,
Same problem as described above: stave brackets are invisible in 1-line percussion staff. When entering a bracket on a staff (by select and double-click or by click and drop) all the staves are moved a bit to the right as if to make space for the bracket, but it's still not showing.

Bug replicated on all tries, my system: windows 10, musescore versions: and nigthly (64-bit):

Frequency Few Many
Reported version 3.1  

Still broken as of MuseScore 3.3 Release Candidate.

I guess if you really wanted percussion brackets, the only way you're gonna get them is by making a picture in MSPAINT or something like that. Then you would add horizontal frames (which should be called vertical, but whatever), and then add picture. You can then resize the picture to be in line with the staves. This is a lot of work and for my own stuff I avoid it, but if you need it then this might be the way to go for now until they get it working.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Regression Yes No
Workaround No Yes

Here's a possible workaround that does not involve the gobbledygook from my earlier post.
1. Create a new score with two unpitched percussion instruments that use one line each, like triangle, or cymbal.
2. Select the first measure of the upper staff.
3. Right click and select "Staff/Part Properties..."
4. Change the number of lines to 2. Close the dialog.
5. With the measure still selected, open Master Palette > Brackets and double click on a bracket. You now have a bracket.
6. Drag the bracket down to encompass the bottom staff.
7. Select the upper staff again and go back into "Staff/Part Properties..."
8. Change the number of lines for the upper staff back to 1.
9. You have just tricked Musescore into doing the expected behavior instead of just moving the whole score to the right.

This works on Musescore version 3.3.2 for Windows 10, 64 bit.

Status PR created fixed

Fixed in branch master, commit c75b918723

_Fix #290409 - Stave brackets disappear on a 1 line percussion staff

Original code was using the height of the staff to calculate the hight of the
brackets. But for single line staff (percussion instruments!) there is only one
line, resulting in a height of zero, meaning a height of zero.
Now, for single line staves, the height of the barlines is taken. Since barlines
can span several staves in a system the calculation of the barline height has to
implemented in this code itself.
By setting the correct bbox and yOffset for the SysStaff object, this changes will
affect the layout of the system. Compared with version 3.4 all staves of a system
are on exactly the same position._

Fix version